30 November 2015

We changed our minds quicker than I expected about The Purple Carrot, and are
anticipating another delivery this Wednesday. A couple of immediate spurs to
this this decision: last week due to foul weather I didn’t make it to the
grocery store on the day I’d planned, and then the meal I’d planned to make
required ethnic ingredients that weren’t available in my neighborhood. So my good
intentions basically collapsed due to poor planning.

Instead, we ordered from Sprig,
which a friend had tipped me off about: it’s an organic meal delivery service.
On the upside, the meals are priced reasonably, arrive relatively quickly, and
are made of wholesome organic ingredients (which—along with calorie counts—are clearly
communicated). On the downside, the flavors (on the two occasions on which we
ordered) are underwhelming.

My new interest in grocery and/or meal delivery pointed me to
another service, Lighter, which serves
Chicago. Like The Purple Carrot, Lighter
delivers the ingredients and recipes of wholesome meals; however, ingredients
are sourced locally and delivered in person rather than by FedEx (you schedule
your delivery so you can receive it). Other
big differences: you can choose a plan that includes meat or only vegetables
and meal plans start at nine meals a week and go up from there—but meals may
include breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner—you choose how many of each (The Purple
Carrot offers a standard meal size/type).
Further, Lighter has a more custom bent: the idea is that you choose
your goals, indicate what foods you can’t/won’t eat, and their nutritionists
design a meal plan.

I like the idea of a more complete, customized meal plan,
and would prefer that my ingredients aren’t sent from across the country, but
our schedule right now doesn’t permit us to try Lighter. Maybe next year.

In the meantime, we look forward to our next delivery from
The Purple Carrot. Since we are traveling a few days each week until
mid-December, it’s actually going to be a great convenience to have the
ingredients of three healthy vegan meals delivered to our home—during a very
hectic period we won’t have to plan anything. We are also excited about the
opportunity to learn more relatively quick techniques (preparation of the meals
takes 45 minutes or less). In the first week of using The Purple Carrot I
learned to make tahini sauce, massage kale, and make the quickest black bean
burger ever, all of which I found pretty thrilling. Also, every (Mark
Bittman-written) recipe we have tried from The Purple Carrot has turned out delicious,
which is hugely persuasive.

17 November 2015

Last year around this time, I read Mark Bittman’s VB6:
Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good
after hearing him talk about it at last year’s Chicago
Humanities Festival. Bittman was promoting the idea of eating vegan, whole
foods for breakfast and lunch—and relaxing restrictions at dinner. He explained
that he invented the system to deal with his own health issues (creeping weight
gain, newly borderline cholesterol, blood pressure, and pre-diabetes conditions)
and found it to be eminently doable, effective, and also delicious.

I found his talk inspiring, and his book equally so. The
book includes great advice, like prepping vegetables when you bring them home
from the grocery store, so it’s less of a chore to cook on a weeknight. For
some months I was cooking a lot more at home, but frequent travel would get me
out of the habit.

So I tried it. The recipes are great, but I was underwhelmed
by the delivery service. Last Wednesday I got a big heavy box, with ingredients
for three recipes. I found all the packaging embarrassing. They make a big deal
about how you can recycle the cold packs (slit them open, dump the gel in the
trash, and then put the plastic in the recycle), but doing that weekly just
seemed an awful waste to me. And I didn’t see the need to get stuff delivered
that I normally keep in my pantry (cans of black beans, or cumin). So while I
had success with the recipes (even with one for which the packers omitted one
of the requisite vegetables), I cancelled.
I thought I’d work with the recipes (which are available to anybody) and
do my own shopping.

Today I’m questioning that decision. I’d planned to go to
the grocery store, but it’s pouring. And tomorrow I can’t shop, either.

The building was designed by prominent architect Helmut Jahn, and our
opinion of him was quite low for a long time in spite of the way he is often
highlighted on the CAF
boat tours we take approximately annually with out-of-town guests.

Two things changed our point of view about this building (somewhat). First, some years ago, with a friend
visiting from out of town, we had a chance to visit the tippy-top of the Hard Rock Hotel, which is located
in the former Carbide and
Carbon Building. They were
renovating at that time, and the elevator took all the way up even though
it was under construction. We had a chance to look out the windows, from which
the views down on the city were just fabulous. And when I saw the Thompson
Center from that vantage, I said, “Oh, I know why they chose
that design. In a maquette it would have looked awesome!”

Second, we visted Berlin a couple of years later and
encountered the thrilling Sony Center,
also a Helmut Jahn project. It is hard to find good photos because the complex
is so enormous, but when we saw it Victor and I both thought, This is what the Thompson Center was
practice for.

Our attitude toward the building thus transformed. Perspective is all.

11 November 2015

There is something so very wrong when college students are subject to racial epithets and ugly vandalism and nothing is
done, as has happened at Missouri State University. Now, because the football
team decided to strike, there are at least some administrative changes in the
offing, but there is still not much clarity around how the racist behavior at
the root of current events will be addressed.

And when the protesting students
make (perhaps) a misjudgment (the refusal to tolerate a media photographer at
their tent city on campus), the world rushes to condemn them.

As if pushing one reporter away outweighs addressing any harm
the students have suffered and will suffer due to entrenched racism in the
university community.

I suppose it is because racism makes us so uncomfortable. We much prefer to believe it doesn’t exist, or if
it does, then it isn’t our responsibility to fix.

The other night I was glued to Twitter, reading a
conversation between Roxane Gay (who
recently spoke at the Humanities
Festival here in Chicago) her friend, sociologist Dr. Tressie Cottom, and David Simon, the former
journalist who created the great television series The Wire and Treme. David
Simon was arguing for absolute freedom of the press, criticizing the protestors
for barring access to photographer Tim Tai. Gay and Cottom were making a more
nuanced argument, accounting for the protesters’ wariness of media and their
desire to foster a safe space.

What stunned me most was how much Twitter energy was going
into arguing over this incident—one viral video. This was more worth discussing
than how we fix the real problems that those protesters are facing? Tim Tai
himself tweeted, “Just want to reiterate that
while I think we need to talk about the 1st Am issues from today, the larger
story is not about that.”

Can we have multiple conversations (e.g., about racism and
about the importance of the first amendment)? It seems like we ought to be able
to. But when one conversation is difficult, we tend to supplant the difficult conversation with the easier one. And if the
easier one involves switching blame to the victims we might be complicit in
harming, so much the better.

We not only get to avoid the difficult conversation, but we
get to weasel out of our responsibility to fix the root problem. It’s like focusing
on a rape victim’s tacky fashion sense, or—even more typically—focusing on the
shoplifting activity of an unarmed teen killed by police.

I don’t know what stops this. Per Daniel Kahneman (Thinking,
Fast and Slow), answering an easier question when we’re asked a hard
one is something we just do. Recognizing
that we do it is one step forward, but only the first.

I was introduced to Twyla Tharp by a couple of
1980s movies. I was struck by the choreography in Milos Forman’s Hair, which remains one of
my favorite movies of that era, and in White Nights, which I went
to see in the theater repeatedly (it remains a guilty pleasure to see again on
video). The idea of ballet had always
bored me, but now I felt that there was something to it. I was utterly thrilled
by the mix of movement and emotion. Perhaps
it was Mikhail
Baryshnikov and Gregory
Hines as much as Twyla Tharp who enraptured me. Regardless, she went to the
top of my mental list of who to go see live when I had means and opportunity.

That took more than a decade. We were living in Columbus, Ohio. The Wexner Center for the Arts brought Twyla Tharp in 2002. She had a long association
with the Wexner and appeared in person after the performance to crankily
answer the questions of dance students in the audience. While I don’t remember the performance
specifically, I remember feeling much the same thrill—and feeling very fortunate.

I can’t say the same of Movin’
Out, which I’d looked forward to intensely.
After all, I’d grown up adoring Billy Joel’s music. Adding
my favorite choreographer to the mix could only be a bonus.

That was a miscalculation. The choreography was so literal
and uninspired, I felt embarrassed. I remember saying it was like watching the Solid Gold dancers.
Almost every choreographic move was sexualized, as if mimicking sexual intimacy
was the only interesting choice. (In fact, when you make that choice every time,
it becomes dull.)

While the current performance isn’t all about sex, it is
unfortunately much about sameness. After a brief First Fanfare, the new Preludes
and Fugues (the music is from Bach’s Well-Tempered
Clavier) contains a number of lovely and surprising moments but they are
repeated without development over 45 minutes, which diminishes their impact. The
second act starts with a stunning Second
Fanfare—brief, like the first. The striking choreography of this piece is
enhanced by silhouette effects on and behind the curtain. The long Yowzie
has a vibrant early jazz soundtrack, but in spite of some delightful moments, the
repetition without development eliminates any feeling of excitement you might
have had at first.

This is a busy time of year for us, and I think our
disappointment was sharpened by the feeling that we could have had a night
off! Our powerfully positive early impressions of Twyla Tharp have been pretty definitively wiped out.

05 November 2015

I rode my bike over to the new
606 trail yesterday with a friend. It’s a hugely popular new elevated park,
on the site of a disused rail line. It’s similar in concept to New York City’s Highline, but a
different animal. The 606 is twice as long (just over three miles), allows
bicyclists, and is located in a part of the city that’s a lot less dense. That
means most views from the 606, while pleasant, lack the spectacular punch of
views from the Highline. You see a lot of different residential real estate
(some of which looks brand new—as if built or rehabbed to leverage a potential
gentrification boom around the 606’s popularity) so it feels more neighborhood-y,
which is appropriate to the kind of city Chicago is.

On a beautiful Wednesday afternoon, the trail was heavily
used by strollers, loungers, bicyclists, joggers, speed walkers, and school
kids. Part of the vision for the 606 is to connect to different parks on
Chicago’s West Side, and it looked likely that the school group was using it
for that purpose. The new park works a more beautiful way to commute between Bucktown
and the far West side and as a beautiful (and perhaps delicious) way to explore
a different part of town, if you’re not from there.

During both my visits to
the 606, I ate with companions at 90
Miles Cuban Café, which is just north of the trail on Armitage Avenue at
Rockwell in Logan Square. So it’s a great resource for neighborhood residents
and also offers potential for turning these West Side neighborhoods into
destinations.

The plantings along the trail are still in process, and will
doubtless take some years to really come into their own, but even now the
greenery creates a tranquil environment, and the several seating areas and short
parallel trails (some with soft walking surfaces, surrounded by more heavily
planted areas) make the trail even more parklike. As parks continue to be
developed near its access points, the 606 will be an even more attractive
greenspace.